## Replication Materials

Replication materials for "Connective Effervescence and Streaming Chat During Political Debates" by Tiago Ventura, Kevin Munger, Katherine McCabe, and Keng-Chi Chang. Forthcoming in the Journal of Quantitative Description, Digital Media. 

> __Abstract:__
> Recent advancements in online streaming technologies have re-centered the audience as an important part of live broadcasts, including live political events. In fall 2020, each of the U.S. presidential and vice presidential debates were streamed on a number of online platforms that provided an integrated streaming chat where the public could comment in real-time alongside the live debate video. Viewers could simultaneously tune into what the candidates were saying and see what a sample of their peers thought about the candidates. This study examines large samples of comments made in social chat feeds during the livestreamed debates on the ABC News, NBC News, and Fox News Facebook pages to quantify key features associated with the quality of political discussion on these platforms. The results reveal that consistent with quasi-anonymous, constrained nature of the dynamic chat, the comments made are generally short, include a substantial degree of toxicity and insults, and differ significantly in their content across platforms. These findings underscore the importance of further study of online streaming chat as a new source of potential influence on political attitudes and behavior.
> 

The latest pre-print can be found [here](ventura_et_al_jqd.pdf). The published version is [here](). And the supplement files are [here]()

## Tutorial 

This README file provides an overview of the replications materials for the article. The R codes used in the article can be found under the folder Codes. The observational data from the streaming chats, which we fully describe below, is under the folder data. Results are exported to the folder output. 

## Codes

- `jqd_analysis_main_paper.R`: Implements all the results discussed in the paper. 

- `jqd_analysis_sif.R`: Implements the results presented in the Supplemental Files.

## Data

Our paper presents analyses based comments from streaming chats collected on facebook. The  data is available under `data`. We direct the reader to section "Data Collection and Sampling Strategy" for a in-depth description of our data collections process. You need to unzip the data first to get access to our csv file. 

